One of my friends called me up last evening to check about some offers running by one popular E-commerce sites. He came to know about the offer through a promotional email sent by the E-commerce merchandiser. I googled the same thing and discovered the same offer and it was quite an exciting, unmissable deal. Eventually, I bought a few things and shared the information in a WhatsApp group. I am sure a few of them in the group would have bought some items too. I am Happy that I saved some rupees with the deal.

But somewhere down the line, something had lost its value; yes, it is the particular promotional Email that actually made me aware of the deal. It failed to get its due recognition from the increased conversions. These conversions were completely out of record. It’s not the inefficiency of the campaign, rather the exclusiveness of the tracking process that led to this information gap; customer behavior not being considered while measuring the impact of the campaign.

Unlike Western customers, Indians are more collectivistic in nature and the contribution of mutual social interaction towards increased conversion is not negligible. With a fast growing Internet population in India, a section of people use emails for communication but they may not be comfortable to transact online in an e-Commerce site.

Let us assume that an email is sent when a company releases a new product. There are chances that a customer orders the product using a link embedded in the email HTML. But we cannot rule out the probability that the person does not buy it by clicking on the mail but visits the website, or he may walk up to a store to buy the same product (Offline Purchase). It can happen to any type of campaigns, it looks like it’s a very small or negligible number of audience/recipients, but it is not insignificant.

Moreover, we do not limit our campaigns only to sell/promote our products, but it is also used for brand building, strengthening customer relationship, increasing the brand visibility and credibility etc.

Email reaches more audience than what the numbers in the report actually says

A beautiful email creative can fetch you new subscribers

Word of mouth advertisement is still significant in India

Do not limit the measuring of ROI to the conversions in the Email tracking report. There is a need to see beyond the graphs in the final report. The obvious question is ‘How’. Multi-channel Business Intelligence Solutions might rescue marketers from such a dilemma to a significant extent.

They say “All that glitters is not gold” but this is the gold tha may not glitter if we are blind to it. In this case, Email Marketing is a golden opportunity offering more than what we see.